OUR DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

The perfect urban bicycle

Imagine the ideal city. If you’re like us, that city is clean, peaceful and visually stunning. No less energized than the urban environments in which we currently thrive, but more pure, and more in tune with the natural world.

That dream is what drives us in the creation of our urban-landscape-changing bikes. Our goal is to create a paradigm shift in the way society imagines transportation. To compete directly with cars by designing bikes that are so beautiful that they imbue our cities with new meaning, making us healthier, happier, and more connected than a car ever could.

Simply put, our bikes, and those that ride them have the ability to transform the world into a more beautiful place, and blend our dreams for the future, whilst meeting the needs of the present. All it takes is one look, and one ride to understand the difference we can make, as bike, rider, and design become one.

DESIGNERS

The Biomega bike design tradition clearly originates from Scandinavia, even though not all the bike designers are Scandinavian. A lot of work has gone into staying true to a clear urban essence, simple appearance and simple Human-Machine interface. The bike design work is consistently perfectionist throughout the product line and fully in tune with the bike design philosophy. Biomega is the first bike design company to dedicate its resources to the bicycle and to turning it into a pure bike design product. We are committed to designing the perfect urban bike and exploring its frontiers.

All bike designers involved with Biomega work towards excellence and use the four design principles:

INTEGRATION, DRIVABILITY, DURABILITY and VISIBILITY.

Yet every bike designer has his or her own approach to the perfect urban bicycle. Marc Newson was the first bike designer to work for Biomega. His futuristic, technically rigorous and serial approach to bike design has influenced the bike design language of Biomega. Jens Martin Skibsted and his bike design group KiBiSi have been equally influential because of the sheer number of product designs and his unique creative direction. Beatrice Santiccioli, then Apple’s colour expert, selected the original colours for Biomega’s bicycle collection. Biomega’s initial bike design quest was to create a sense of optimism within sustainable transport.

“For the Biomega brand I’ve tried to make instantclassics”

Jens Martin Skibsted, Founder

Jens Martin Skibsted

“For the Biomega brand I’ve tried to make instant classics. This might sound a little far-fetched, but I think you can discipline yourself to have a certain eye for the phenomenology of an object and reproducing the essence of that object in a specific design for your time and surroundings, without it losing its appeal over time—contrary to being an object of fashion.”

Jens Martin Skibsted is a bike designer and design philosopher. He’s the founder of Biomega, and KiBiSi, a leading Scandinavian product design group. His bicycle designs feature in the permanent collections at the Danish Design Museum, MoMA, Le CNAP and SFMoMA. Jens Martin Skibsted was honored as a Young Global Leader by World Economic Forum and has received numerous awards and distinctions. He has spoken at Davos, DLD, Design Indaba and TED. He is the Vice-Chair of World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design Innovation. He is a published author and a guest blogger for Fast Company.

KiBiSi was founded in Copenhagen by Lars Larsen, Bjarke Ingels Group and Jens Martin Skibsted. Each partner contributes with intelligence and experience from within his specific field providing KiBiSi with cutting edge knowledge and knowhow within the fields of architecture, design, furniture, electronics, transportation, contemporary culture and lifestyle.

Lars Larsen

Lars Larsen, known as an industrial designer rooted with a straight forward approach to bike design merging elements of contemporary culture from high and low: the art scene as well as the street, the fashion house as well as the workshop. Lars’s natural eye for blatant and simple solutions to complex bike design problems, has earned him awards and instant acclaim as one of Scandinavian designs fastest rising stars.

Lars Larsen has received a number of awards and international recognition for his work as an individual and as founding KiBiSi partner and KiBiSi Head Of Design. Lars got his first award right after graduation as industrial designer for being Denmark’s best upcoming and has over the years proved this position through being awarded Danish Business Magazine – Berlingske Business talent price – Talent 100 in 2010 and same year receiving the Danish Design Price for his headphone design for Aiaiai.

Lars’s work is today represented at SFMOMA’s permanent exhibition and was exhibited at SFMOMA’s 2012 exhibition Less and More: the Design and Ethos of Dieter Rams next to iconic pieces of design such as the iPhone and MacBook Air. Kilo work was nominated for Design Of The Year by Design Museum London 2012 and latest recognition received is a Red Dot Design Award – Best of the Best for the KiBiSi designed magnetic bike light iFlash One.

Bjarke Ingels

Bjarke Ingels started BIG Bjarke Ingels Group in 2005 after co-founding PLOT Architects in 2001 and working at OMA in Rotterdam. Through a series of award-winning design projects and buildings, Bjarke has developed a reputation for designing buildings that are as programmatically and technically innovative as they are cost and resource conscious. Bjarke has received numerous awards and honors, including the Danish Crown Prince’s Culture Prize in 2011, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2004, and the ULI Award for Excellence in 2009. In 2011, the Wall Street Journal awarded Bjarke the Architectural Innovator of the Year Award. In 2012, the American Institute of Architects granted the 8 House its Honor Award, calling it “a complex and exemplary project of a new typology.”

Alongside his architectural practice, Bjarke taught at Harvard University, Yale University, Columbia University, and Rice University and is an honorary professor at the Royal Academy of Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen. He is a frequent public speaker and has spoken in venues such as TED, WIRED, AMCHAM, 10 Downing Street, and the World Economic Forum.

Marc Newson

“I approached both bikes as an exercise in joining the dots and looked for the simplest form that was able to do this, to connect the headset to either the bottom bracket or seat and then to the rear wheel. Also, it was of huge importance to me to lose all the superfluous shit and hide all the ugly bits, like the cables.”

Marc Newson has been described as the most influential designer of his generation. His clients include a broad range of the best known and most prestigious brands in the world. He is currently the Creative Director of Qantas Airways. Marc Newson was included in Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World and has received numerous awards and distinctions.

He was appointed The Royal Designer for Industry in the UK, received an honorary doctorate from Sydney University, holds Adjunct Professorships at Sydney College of the Arts and Hong Kong Polytechnic University, and most recently was made CBE by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. His work is present in many major museum collections, including the MoMA in New York, London’s Design Museum and V&A, the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Vitra Design Museum.

Ross Lovegrove

Ross Lovegrove is a designer and visionary who’s work is considered to be at the very apex of stimulating a profound change in the physicality of our three dimensional world.

Inspired by the logic and beauty of nature his design possess a trinity between technology, materials science and intelligent organic form, creating what many industrial leaders see as the new aesthetic expression for the 21st Century. There is always embedded a deeply human and resourceful approach in his designs, which project an optimism, and innovative vitality in everything he touches from cameras to cars to trains, aviation and architecture.

Winner of numerous international awards his work has been extensively published and exhibited internationally including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum NY, Axis Centre Japan, Pompidou Centre, Paris and the Design Museum, London, when in 1993 he curated the first permanent collection. His work is held in permanent collections of various design museums around the world including Museum of Modern Art in New York (MOMA), Design Museum in London and Vitra Design Museum Weil Am Rhein, Basel, CH.

OUR PHILOSOPHY

Biomega’s philosophy is optimization of technology, ethics and aesthetics: New Tech, New Ethics, New Aesthetics.

Tech

High-tech is a strange concept. ‘‘High’’ often seems simply to mean that there’s a lot of tech; frankly, who gives a damn about how much tech there is in a certain product? It’s about the quality of it, not the quantity. We operate with two tech concepts in our bike design work: Mega- and Meta-tech. Mega-tech is when the fascination of a certain technology becomes the driving force of the bike design, and innovation arises from a clash between form & function and this technology; Meta-tech is where technology becomes instrumental to the bike design and subsequently can cause paradigms to break in the application of technologies.

Ethics

The common perception of ethics is that of a static imperative: You should do x, y and z. Through our work with total quality management it has become apparent to Biomega that ethical good can be viewed as a simple quality that can be improved through process control, rather than trying to achieve an absolute and static state at once. Ethics can be as simple as make it better and better.

Aesthetics

Our history of style & value has a danish heritage. However danish design has in many cases become its own pastiche: Exaggerated, lifeless minimalism. This was not what the danish Masters intended. We have looked for a cheerful strain of danish design and breathed new life into this tradition, which we call Organic Minimalism. This style was anchored in furniture, then interior danish design. Now we are moving this interior danish design aesthetic to the outdoors—or if you prefer, we are making the entire urban landscape interior.